How to turn an in-house marketing team from loan officer support into a scalable brand function

Every marketing team that starts out "supporting" sales can fall victim to being forever led by the very salespeople it supports. Not to suggest that loan officers are bad at requesting marketing, but they are. I look at supporting loan officers the way I would support a franchise system. They came to work under your brand because your business had value they could not achieve on their own. You might be the biggest bank in town or the smallest. Your company might have Taco Tuesdays. Whatever it was, your business offers loan officers a platform that lets them create sales with your support.

The problem is that promising continued, personalized marketing support sells them the notion that the marketing team works for them. You did not hire a marketing team to spend every waking hour on sales requests.

Pretend your loan officers are franchisees

When a franchisee joins a brand, they invest: an upfront fee and an ongoing royalty on sales. Some of those dollars fund marketing. A new location gets PR, an email blast, some localized materials, and the right to share the brand name. That is the important part.

They pay for the brand, a brand a marketing team built, and they agree to use only the marketing the franchisor supplies. If you invest in a Burger King, you cannot have it your way, because the franchisor does not trust that you can market the location better than the brand can.

So why do lenders give away the farm and let loan officers decide their own marketing? They should not. But they sold that expectation. Personalization destroys brands. It destroys efficiency. It destroys speed and quality.

Consistency

You want a consistent, cohesive, professional brand. Then stop letting salespeople drive the bus. They are not marketing professionals and they do not know the brand guidelines. If you are a marketing professional, advocate for a library of materials and assets the sales team can draw from, with a very limited amount of personalization.

Quality

Pumping out listing flyers or dabbling in personal Facebook accounts will never produce quality work, because those are the wrong priorities. How does posting five times a day on a personal page beat a brand-sponsored video that is unique, high quality, engages the company's audience and reaches into that audience's network? Focus on worthy projects, give them the attention they deserve, and the outcomes follow.

Speed

Your team can work fast and produce little value, but what is the point? Use the full power of the brand and stop diluting it. And consider: if you give everything to a few individuals, you embolden them to do it without you. Eventually they become their own brand, and then what do they need you for?

Purpose

A marketing team should think about the goals of a campaign, the user's intent, the right channels for the audience, and how to track results so the next campaign is better. None of that is possible when all the work goes out through individuals.

So what do I do?

Did you ruin your company by supporting your staff? No, but you have work to do. Start with a marketing audit and invite your loan officers to take part. Gather every asset, print, digital, social and video, and dump it on a table. Go through all of it and ask whether each piece provides value to everyone at the table. If yes, it goes in the pile. Then do it again.

Cull everything unnecessary and make what remains the way a franchisor would make it for franchisees. You want custom? Go somewhere else. Do not waver. From now on, marketing decides marketing. Personalize through labels and business cards, and do not look back.

Final thoughts

At some point you have created business cards, labels, envelopes, tri-folds, photos, graphics, copy, social ads, display ads, print ads, billboards, postcards, brand guidelines and God knows what else, and your loan officers cannot find any of it. They are in the dark while marketing scrambles to make more.

Be the hero. Organize all your media, messaging, print and digital assets. Two investments of time come before any cloud-based ordering system:

• Organize your files on a shared drive with a structure that is easy to access and non-destructive. Save every format you might need at the same time. You will quickly have thousands of items.
• Start a marketing resource center binder. Print every item and label what it is for. It is time-consuming and worth it, because you will finally see everything you have to work with.

The goal is a collaborative, cloud-based digital asset management area linked to a trusted printer, where a loan officer can review the catalog and download, print or order what they need. You save the time you were spending on more and more one-off creative, and they find what they need in minutes.

Originally published on LinkedIn on February 28, 2020. Read the original and the comments.